Screwdriver
by Kitty O
Summary: They took Gaby. Her partners want her back. Hopefully going to be H/C, angsty friendship, with some romance.
1. Chapter 1

He hadn't even noticed when his hands started trembling, but he suspected that was because they had been shaking on and off for three days – for 74 hours, actually, without subtracting the sixteen of those hours that he had managed to sleep.

His first hint this time wasn't the hands, then, but the distortion of the voices around him. Napoleon's voice, dry as ever at his shoulder, and the man's voice in his handheld transmitter both grew deeper and slowly buzzing overtook them – and Illya had been so angry for so long that without this clue, he might not have realized he was about to have an episode.

He'd been this angry ever since Gaby was taken, after all.

" _Peril? Peril, we have a dozen men to plow through, you need to stay with me."_

They'd come to this building to get her back, and now they stood together in the darkness, ready in their black mission outfits. It was supposed to be a safe house, hard to find, harder to get into.

Illya wanted to raze it to the ground.

Solo's hand landed on his arm, and for a moment Illya thought about ripping it off. He grunted as the voice floated through the haze of anger. _"Peril?"_ He sounded worried.

Illya was not worried.

"Point me at the enemy," he managed to growl before his mind fogged entirely.

"All ten of them?" Solo asked, but he managed to get Illya facing the right way as the Russian started forward.

The next time Illya was aware, there were no longer ten enemies.

"Let us get her back now," he said, stepping on a man's hand as he made his way to the first door. The owner of the hand was understandably silent.


	2. Chapter 2

It wasn't unusual for a team member to put one or both of the others in danger. On their very first mission, Gaby betrayed them to Nazis. About a day later, Solo rammed the car she was in off the road. Sometimes circumstances were not easy.

But Illya did not play around with the safety of his comrades – though he had been told not to call them that again – and he tried to avoid putting them in harm's way.

More Gaby than Solo, of course. Because Solo was infuriating and immature, for all his suave talk, and Gaby – well, Gaby….

Gaby was gone. And it was Illya's fault.

He was supposed to have her back, to keep her safe – but then a second person of interest had slipped down an alley, and he'd thought, really truly thought, that she would be safe with just Napoleon's bird's eye view.

The disadvantage of a bird's eye view: you are powerless to stop a masked man from exiting a car, pressing a gun to your partner's back, and taking her away in the space of a heartbeat without so much as a whimper. Napoleon shouted then, abandoning his usual subtlety in fear, but it was no good. Illya was too far away, after all, and the car was out of sight by the time he came sprinting around the corner.

The most important girl in the world, gone in half a minute. And whatever had happened to her since then – all his fault.

It made Illya deeply ashamed.

And being ashamed made Illya angry.

* * *

If there was anything on the walls or any surfaces between the door and the singular cell, it was sent crashing to the ground, probably in pieces. He might have missed a few things – he didn't stop to go back. He just ran through the small house, a furious bull in a broken-down, dirty china shop, desperately getting closer to his chop shop girl, his missing partner.

He found the door to the basement and crashed through it, leaving Solo to pick through the wreckage at a slightly slower pace.

Illya was getting close now, he could feel it. Could practically taste her perfume in the air.

"Gaby!"

"You see her?" Solo immediately asked, before shutting up and listening for a response. He took the stairs two at a time, unlike his gargantuan Russian friend, who went down by multiples of four.

"Gaby!" Illya called again as he turned around the wall to face her cell, his heart swelling because she was right _there_ , and soon she'd be close enough to _touch_ —

He stopped.

Solo caught up about a second later, and looked around. "She's not here."

Staggering slightly, Illya pulled back the barred door and stepped inside. It had the faintest smell of her, and several hairpins scattered the unmade cot.

"But she was here," Solo noted from the doorway.

Illya took another stride towards the cot, looking it over. He grabbed a sheet of paper that peeked out from under the covers and held it close to his face, trying to read in the dim light.

It said, in English, _Better luck next time,_ fellas _! Gaby says hello._ At the bottom was a crude stick figure with a skirt.

"They knew we were coming," Solo said in a lower voice, and forgot himself so far as to actually reach up and muss his perfectly arranged hair.

Illya's fists clenched so fast that he heard his knuckles crack. Dark blood was dribbled across the page, onto the bedsheet, and even on the pillow.

"And they _hurt_ her," he managed to growl as the edges of the paper crumpled in his hand.


	3. Chapter 3

The first time Napoleon Solo met Illya Kuryakin, he'd taunted the other man into throwing a table. At the time he'd congratulated himself on a job well done, knowing he was the victorious party since he was the one who kept his cool.

But it occurred to Napoleon, much later, that the Peril was different than he was; he didn't consider keeping calm to necessarily be a sign of victory. He wasn't made for subtlety or mind games. Kuryakin was trained to destroy even if it was loud and messy, which was probably why his occasional fits of temper didn't seem to embarrass him the way they would have embarrassed Napoleon.

Still, he didn't understand what was going on right now.

"Peril, she's not here, she's not hidden in the sheets," Napoleon said from the doorway as he watched his partner throw the furnishings in the cell and bang on some of the stones.

"No," he agreed, standing up straight and breathing hard. "No, Cowboy. But Gaby is smart. She would have tried to leave something. Clue, maybe."

"She probably didn't know we were coming. Besides, all she had on her when she was taken were her clothes and her weapons. What could she have –"

"I do not know," Kuryakin said. He cast his eyes around desperately. "We have lost her."

Napoleon looked at the bottom of the bed to avoid looking at the sadness in front of him, and stopped. "There's soft scum on the floor. It's damp here. Peril—"

"I see it." Kuryakin's eyes had followed his. There were scratches on the scum where the bed's feet rested. "She moved the cot."

"Let's see what's behind it then." Napoleon started forward. But the Red Peril, as ever, was fast, and had already thrown the whole bedframe aside.

* * *

This new bed was less comfortable than the last by far, and the last one had felt like stones, so that was saying something. Gaby groaned and blinked again, trying to get used to the light.

She'd hit her head. Or they had hit her head. Thinking straight was a real bother now.

Gaby had heard only one name so far, but she wondered if she could trust it. Most of the things she'd seen so far seemed to make logical sense – the questions, the cold rooms, the bars keeping her in.

All the same, she suspected she was sick or drugged.

Because she'd seen her captors face, and recognized him as a man that Illya killed a year ago.


End file.
